


Let's Be Friends (Or: Saro!)

by theinimitablefolding



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Angst (minor), College AU, F/F, Glimmer and bow only get mentions, Pining, it's sort of modernist again, sorry lads - Freeform, tw weed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:54:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25061203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theinimitablefolding/pseuds/theinimitablefolding
Summary: Catra works up the confidence to confess to Adora, all the while contemplating what her feelings could even mean.
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 23





	Let's Be Friends (Or: Saro!)

**Author's Note:**

> Hey all, this was written partly as an excuse to interrogate the idea of fetishization and also the pining trope which we find so often in fic. It was also written partly because tumblr user @schmeisto complained about a lack of fics. So, there ya go. It's stylistically kind of a bastardization of "Arthur Gordyn Pym" and "Ada or Ardor" neither of which I necessarily recommend if you're not a literature student. Anyway, might do some more if y'all like it.

Something hungry, restless in her brain, like a tiger pacing in its cage, yellow eyes passing back and forth behind the bars. Back and forth. Yellow and blue. Staring. That gaping maw in her brain, like a wound, like a canyon, it keeps growing and growing, demanding to be fed. In class, her mind drifts to occupy that space. 

She imagines herself as a 19th century pickpocket in London. She imagines the object of her affection as a wealthy governess. Perhaps, this time, she is already married to some wealthy and insufferable man. Perhaps this time she steals her pocket-watch or necklace and there is a chase through the streets. That is how she knows that she has met her match – that she is taken, because she chases her down and stops her and takes it back, and then she can’t get her out of her head even after that encounter. Then what? 

She knows the story only in its two parts: inciting incident, and climax. The connective tissue of the story is grey, hazy forms which lead, eventually and inevitably, to the two of them making love. Passionately this time, and under some time constraint – her husband will be home soon, and they are likely to be discovered. Her dress is all straps and buttons and ties, and she doesn’t have the patience, so she tears it, and Adora yelps in delighted, aroused, shock. And now she’s thought her name, and her brain is off.

Adora. Adora. Adora! It could be a prayer. A mantra. She says it over and over in her mind, willing something into being- or into action. She prays: make this love less like an obsession, somehow. Make it something bearable, something which isn’t rattling the bars of its cage. Something which isn’t threatening at any moment to explode out and cause calamity. Imagine the bodies in its wake, the lives torn apart. 

She cannot merely pray, and her imagination cannot satisfy her. She will sneak one look, to satisfy it, and then she’ll be able to focus. 

So, she turns, and she sees her there in the desk diagonal from her own, eyes ahead, scribbling notes. She is diligent. Her Adora. Her blonde hair is tied back, and she can see just there the shaved sides, and there the strands which fall loosely out of formation, somehow always present and always perfectly disheveled to be so. And there, the nape of her neck arches as she bends over her paper. The skin like silk stretched over stone, muscle beneath shaping and reshaping as it angles downward to focus on something just said. Her jawline, too, revealing itself as she turns to look at her, rigid and perfect. 

And then their eyes are meeting. Has she noticed the gaze? She half smiles and her eyes catch the sunlight just so. She imagines the person stumbling out of Plato’s cave for the first time, half dead, and seeing sunlight, blinding sunlight, sunlight that they never imagined, never even had the thoughts to imagine existed. Never had the clay of abstraction to form into a thought of such a thing as sunlight. This is what it must be like for that person. She has to turn away, if only to compose herself. When she turns back Adora is still smiling, and she mouths something, just barely composing it with breath.

“What?” It is half formed, half given life, and it is torture. How long had it been since she had heard her voice? Hours? How long could it have possibly been since they had spoken? Not even hours, and yet, it would have been more preferable to be shut away somewhere, having her fingernails pulled off. This was excruciating, that would have been child’s play. 

This thinking, this interminable thinking, ends, and she was brought into the loud and clamoring world, where there was more than just her. There was a clamoring around her, and Adora turned and the class began to collect their things. She looked around and scanned the clock and glanced at the professor an saw that class was over, and that she had learned nothing at all in that entire seventy-five minutes except that Adora had once again taken up chewing on her cuticles, and that she still pressed down when they bled, pressed and pressed to stop the bleeding. 

Even her blood! Even that was too much. She didn’t know what she wanted to do or why, but something drew her to it. She understood now why people believed in vampires, because that desire lived in her as well. To put Adora’s bleeding fingers between her lips, to lap up the red and to look her in the eyes while doing it. Was she deranged? Was it insanity? The monster in her mind rumbled as Adora drew nearer to her, and she tried to put these thoughts away. Tried to calm that creeping thing inside of her. 

“You good?” Adora asked, tapping her pen on her desk, to grab her attention. Did she know that the movements of her hands sparked something like a frenzy in her? Did she know that the tremor and tremble of her voice incited such a girlish madness within her that she was only one more word away from coming unglued? That her eyes, that that blue is the color she would paint their room? That if she cut her, she would bleed that same blue? 

“Catra?” Her name! How did people do it? How did people survive this sublimity and this torture and this self-flagellation? She was on her knees, striking the studded leather against her bare back, and with each strike she was calling out her name. Adora. Adora. Adora. And yet, she must compose a response. She was a pining housewife in Bath, looking at hands, making meaning out of a glance, sitting in her parlor trying to compose a response to the woman she had loved since she was a girl.

“Sorry, just daydreaming.” She murmured. It seemed a fitting half-truth. Adora cocked her eyebrows and nudged her with her foot. 

“Well come on. I want to get coffee before chem.” Adora said, and Catra scrambled to collect her things, which were mostly in disarray. A habit of a 200-person lecture hall into which she could disappear, and through which she was able to fantasize. If she ever arrived on time, she might even get to sit next to Adora, but her other friends were on time, and bright, and studious, and she mostly smoked weed by the greenhouse with the other people who wound up here through luck or through rich white parents and their rich white smiles. 

Those other friends: Bow and Glimmer, and others in other classes and depending on the day. They didn’t monopolize her time or dislike her choice of best friend. That was the worst of it. If they had hated her, she could have hated them right back, could have made this into a fight for Adora, a fight that she was confident she would win, but they were generally kind, and they invited her to things, and they laughed at her jokes, and she thought that Glimmer might have even secretly liked their occasional, one-on-one chats in-between classes. They were every bit good enough for Adora, which made her wonder: was she?

Was she? She was a burnout, that was what she had been coined in high school. Not quite smart enough to stand out, not quite athletic enough to get on any first-string team, and not quite bad enough to get kicked out entirely. Teachers lectured her on her potential, and her effort. She spent most of her day in the middle of the pack, smoking, eating too little, and clinging to her best friend. 

Clinging, here, being in the metaphorical sense. To cling – to really cling – how that idea awoke the pacing animal in her mind. She longed to cling to her. She longed to feel those arms, those impossible strong arms, wrapped around her, wrapping her tight and close. She longed to feel those arms around her and those fingers inside of her. She could almost taste Adora, just with the thought of it. 

She hazarded a glance, as they walked out of the classroom, at Adora’s muscled forearms, at her expressive gesturing as she talked about how hard the homework for chemistry was, and how much she loathed that class. If Catra was a burnout who never tried, then Adora was firmly in the upper half of the class, but what set her apart was her effort. She was, in her own estimation, an idiot who managed to get perfect scores because she spent mountains of time memorizing formulas and poems and chemical tables. She said that made her dumb, like she ahd to catch up, but Catra didn’t see the difference between that and a genius. And then there were the extracurriculars – the sports, the charities, and the sort-of-sorority with Glimmer and Bow. And Catra, now, after they finally roped her in. 

“- I mean, it’s crazy! They want us to know every single element, but why? Like isn’t that what the periodic table is for? Is someone going to be in a lab like ‘oh, I need to know how heavy radon is, too bad all of the periodic tables got burned up in a fire, but not to worry, Adora memorized the whole thing!’ Ugh! Why do they even make us take this class?” Adora said it all so fast, and so fluidly, that it jogged Catra out of her thoughtfulness. 

“They didn’t make me.” She said with more than a hint of satisfaction in her voice. It was true, she had gotten out of it through a combination of degree-choice and a technicality. Adora gave her the sort of side-eye that you can give a friend before hunching her shoulders.

“I should have gone into the humanities.” She moaned. Catra, who was in the humanities, nodded her head sagely.

“Yes, you should have. Join the rest of us: homeless and in the unemployment line.” She said.

“No way! You’ll live with me and I’ll support you with my boatloads of cash. You can wow my very professional dinner guests with stories about John Donne, or whoever.” Adora said, so fast that it came out as a blur. As an honest blur, which Catra could not help but flush at. The John Donne comment too. She had sent her a poem, and Adora had like it a lot. The Flea! ‘Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?’ Who was she, in the poem? Was she Donne? The woman? She was the flea, if she was anything. And yet, Adora had mentioned some dubious and half-sarcastic future. 

This was another fantasy, a typical one, the one which brought her to sleep, often. Adora, her wife, supporting whatever new artistic frenzy had arisen in her, patiently and sublimely watching as she sketched or painted or wrote or whatever it was that she would end up doing. Her imagination quickly revealed some new creation, Adora draped in fine, cream colored cotton, half undressed, watching her with amusement and adoration as she mixed paints or something like that. It didn’t matter what she was doing, the image – as all images worth mentioning – were focused on Adora. A bourgeois fantasy, of course, an image of wealth that she clung to, but a persistent one.

This thought led to another, more insidious thought – a more wracking thought which lodged itself into the soft part of Catra’s brain and made its home there. Next to that pacing animal. Or perhaps the thought was not itself insidious but was uprooting something insidious. The question of causality. The thought was this: was this love? Was this persistent and sometimes all-consuming thing, a fetish? Not the whips and chains and ball gag kind of fetish, although even the slight glance of that image – the notion of ball gags and whips and spanking paddles – resonated up her stomach and into her spine. No, not that sort of fetish at all. That image was for later, and this one was for now.

She tried to remove herself from her feelings for Adora – she tried to put them into a little box, and to keep them set aside for just a moment. What had her feelings been like when they were small? What had she felt the first time they met? She recalled only a little about their first encounter, but she did remember the way Adora had smiled – missing a tooth, or else a gap in her teeth, she couldn’t remember. The slight strangeness of her smile had not left her at all self-conscious. Catra had done something that had caused her to laugh, and she had boomed and beamed and then Catra had caught sight of that minor imperfection, and even then, the girlish admiration began to gestate into friendship and love.

What of that stretch, then, when they had been enemies? Or something very near to it. That bleaker time in high school when they had gone off in separate directions and even had spats and disagreements which threatened to boil over into conflict, and she had been destroying herself as teenagers so often did. They had even fought, once. Something which had left Adora with a scar on her back – she knew, and something that even as she thought of it now so resembled the tremulous first throws of lovers that it made her blush. Then how Adora had saved her from herself and the viler crowds she had been apart of, did this make her love more true? Or was it closer to worship? To bowing to some enchanted object – the businessman worshiping the commodity, or the Catholic receiving the Eucharist. She thought of herself earlier, flagellating mentally. 

“You’re so spacy today.” Adora said, with some measure of disappointment and concern in her voice. They had made their way to the coffee shop and were standing in line, so close that they were nearly touching, their shoulders just so as they leaned against the railing that delineated where to form the queue – Catra on autopilot the whole way there. 

“Sorry, I was…sorry, anyway.” Catra said, sheepishly. Adora, for her part, nudged her shoulder into Catra’s and shrugged.

“Anything you want to talk about?” She asked. There was a near electric tension as their shoulders collided, and stayed touching for just a moment, before Adora resituated herself, closer still than before, but no longer touching. The casual connections of friendship, maybe. 

And the talk! She wanted to talk about everything, all of it. There was the sudden drive in her gut to talk about everything, to have it out right here in this line at the coffee shop. The death drive. She wanted to fold her arms over her chest and say something stupid. Yes, I’m in love with you, and I’m trying to figure out if its just some hopeless idol worship, some imbued value to do with objectifying you, and I’ve been in this so long I can’t figure it out. So, thoughts? 

She didn’t, of course. There was a time and a place, and this was neither. But maybe there could be both soon. Maybe that was the thing to do, just spill the whole damn thing, just leave all those feelings splayed out on the pavement somewhere, and then let Adora do with them as she liked. She could, after all, only offer her affections and her thoughts – it was up to Adora to reject them. Or reciprocate them. She put the thought out of her head at once. Too much to think about, if that were the case. Too much time to make up for. An animal to satisfy.

And yet, that thought lingered too. It made its home right next to the little spot in her mind where the question of fetishization had made its home, one’s negation might imply the other. If she was not fetishizing Adora, if this sensation was real, then who’s to say it was impossible that Adora might return those feelings? She looked at Adora, who looked at her, deeply questioning. 

“Actually, when’s class?” Even as she said it, she regretted it. She felt her stomach fill up with lead and sink somewhere down into her feet. But, she knew well that half of that weight was excitement. How often had she even thought of spilling it all to Adora? The fear was tremendous, but so too was the excitement that it might be drawing to a close. How often had she felt her skin light up when Adora winked at her, and how often had that feeling brought her folding inward like a collapsing star? The idea that that might end – even badly – was inviting. 

“In, like, 15 minutes. Oh, want anything?” Adora said, sneaking a look at her phone to check the time just as she was called up to order. Catra shook her head and waved the idea way as she hastily and sloppily ran some calculations in whatever failing mathematics center of her brain remained. It seemed to actually be something like perfect. Adora had an out if she rejected her – a way to escape. Adora went up to order, and Catra watched the tenseness in her muscles. The worry. What would she say?

Hey, I love you.

Oh shit, I actually have to go to class. 

It would shatter her, she knew, but the knowledge would be a relief. Adora ordered, and then walked over to lean against a table, where Catra joined her. The smell of the coffee shop was suddenly nauseating, whereas any other time it might be inviting. The idea of putting any food or drink into her stomach right now felt impossible, like she wouldn’t even be able to swallow it. She spoke. 

“Want to go somewhere…” Private? Secret? Somewhere we can break each other’s hearts? Somewhere you can find out that your best friend is into you, or isn’t, and that she can find out you’re not to keen on the idea? “Where we can talk?” 

“Adora?” The barista called, and Adora went to grab her drink. She returned, looking unsure, fiddling with the paper lid of her cup. 

“Sure.” She said quietly. If the walk to the coffee shop had been subdued but interminably long as Catra sorted out her feelings, then the walk to the quiet-study room on the third floor of the library, perpetually empty as it was tucked into a corner far from the computers on the first floor, seemed to go by impossibly fast, even as the distances travelled were essentially the same. And this time they walked in silence, and with each step Catra felt more and more like she was going to vomit – like it was all too much. And then, too soon, the door to the study room was closed, and Adora had set down her coffee and was looking at her expectantly, and there was no escape.

“I…” All of the infinite things to say were caught in her throat. Adora was worried about what she might say, she could see that, but so too where there other obligations on her mind. Classes, and tests, and homework, and studying, and the rest of her life bunching up and Catra felt at once that she was monopolizing her time for nothing. “Nevermind, I…” She turned to leave, but felt Adora’s hand clasp gently around her wrist. 

A pause then, the two of them standing like that. Adora’s hand around her wrist, warm there. Warm and real and soft and Catra could have dissolved into that small intimacy. The idea that she might not love her, that even if these feelings came back, she might be unsatisfied, because loving Adora could never match wanting Adora – it made her sick. She wanted to hold her. Hold her so close that they became one person. A sudden urge to collapse into her. Instead, she turned, and she found Adora’s blue eyes wet, and her hand still on her wrist, and she wanted both to pull away, and to rush forward, but she found herself pinned against her desires like magnets each propelling an opposite force.

“Catra.” She said. Her name, spoken like an invocation, caused that overflow of words, that blockage, to crumple like paper, and at once everything was spilling out of her. All of those years and years backed up inside of her came rushing forth, of course they did, the idea that they could have ever stayed back so long amazed her, mesmerized her as they came so readily in puffs of breath which failed to materialize as words. What did not come out of her mouth presented as tears, hot and angry and terrified and so very in love and so terribly unsure of what it even was to love a person. Did she even know how? 

“If I loved you less, I could have told you sooner.” She started this way, as though Adora were suddenly privy to every feeling within her, and to look at Adora it might be true. A hitch in Adora’s breath. Shock, maybe. She was shocked, as well. “But I’m an idiot, and there’s too much of…it…inside of me to take and I need you to know. To know how much I…I love you. Ever since we were kids, since we met maybe. Since before then, even. I…I’m not any good at any of this, I just needed you to know.” 

She wiped the tears away with the sleeve of her sweater, staring at Adora, trying hard to look composed. Trying hard not to think of the fact that Adora’s class would be starting soon, and if she was going to leave then now would be the time. Trying hard not to think of all of the things Adora could say to deny her, or of how stupid this had been of her, or of how little sense she had been making. No, she ignored it all, and only stared at those blue eyes, that shifting gaze, that trembling mouth. Adora’s hand on her wrist still. 

And her mouth. Adora’s mouth. That mouth which moved, with certainty, to speak.


End file.
